Observer's Fall

Astrophysicist Qian Yu discovered that there are traces of "smoothing" between the physical constants of the universe and human history. He proposed the "fishbowl hypothesis" - the earth is a subsystem in a closed container. Every attempt to define its boundaries triggers an absolutely smooth "blank". Following a fragment from a mentor whose memory had been erased, he found a hypnotist. That man dreamed of the same mirror for forty-seven consecutive days three years ago, and the person in the mirror was always half a step faster - exactly the same as the information in the mentor's fragment. They weren't the only ones to see it. An assistant recording the boundary lines, a modeler pulling the model into alignment, each holding a corner of the same mirror. When the pieces come together, they are faced with a choice: define it and then be written by it; or not define it and stop at the edge of the abyss. The book has about 400,000 words, and responds to "Don't define" with "When you try to define the unknown based on existing science, you are not far from the abyss." There is no definite answer, only a gesture of not putting pen to paper.